Author : Mark Hallett
Publisher : Paul Mellon Ctr for Studies
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 25,66 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780300077780
He shows how contemporary satirists mixed the materials of high and low art to create hybrid and provocative images that dealt with a broad range of controversial issues, including alcoholism, the excesses of fashion, financial collapse, freemasonry, political corruption and prostitution."--Jacket.
Author : Guy Debord
Publisher : Bread and Circuses Publishing
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 15,48 MB
Release : 2012-10-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1617508306
The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.
Author : Leslie Robertson
Publisher : UBC Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 28,2 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9780774810937
Imagining Difference is an ethnography about historical and contemporary ideas of human difference expressed by residents of Fernie, BC -- a coal-mining town transforming into an international ski resort. Focusing on diverse experiences of people from the European diaspora, Robertson analyzes expressions of difference from the multiple locations of age, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion. Her starting point is a popular local legend about an indigenous curse cast on the valley and its residents in the nineteenth century. Successive interpretations of the story reveal a complicated landscape of memory and silence, mapping out official and contested histories, social and scientific theories as well as the edicts of political discourse. Cursing becomes a metaphor for discursive power resonating in political, popular, and cultural contexts, transmitting ideas of difference across generations and geographies. Stories are powerful imaginative resources in the contexts of colonialism, war, immigration, labour strife, natural disaster, treaty-making, and globalization.This study suggests that while criteria may shift, ideas of "race" and "foreignness," expressions of regionalism, and class and religious identity remain fixed in the social imagination. The author draws from folklore, media imagery, historical records, and interviews; field notes and verbatim accounts provide readers with a sense of the ethnographic process. While situated historically and socially in Fernie, BC, this work will appeal to those in anthropology, women’s studies, Native studies, and history, as well as to regional readers and anyone interested in life in resource towns in North America.
Author : Tony Reinke
Publisher : Crossway
Page : 137 pages
File Size : 10,46 MB
Release : 2019-04-17
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1433563827
We live in a world full of shiny distractions, faced with an onslaught of viral media constantly competing for our attention and demanding our affections. These ever-present visual “spectacles” can quickly erode our hearts, making it more difficult than ever to walk through life actively treasuring that which is most important and yet invisible: Jesus Christ. In a journalistic style, Tony Reinke shows us just how distracting these spectacles in our lives have become and calls us to ask critical questions about what we’re focusing on. The book offers us practical steps to redirect our gaze away from the addictive eye candy of the world and onto the Ultimate Spectacle—leading to the joy and rest our souls crave.
Author : Devin Penner
Publisher : UBC Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 48,43 MB
Release : 2019-06-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0774860537
Spectacle is usually considered a superficial form of politics, which tries to distract and deceive a passive audience. It is difficult to see how this type of politics could be reconciled with the democratic requirement of active and informed agency. Rethinking the Spectacle re-examines the tension between spectacle and political agency in our hyper-mediated digital society. Devin Penner uses the theories and practices of Guy Debord and the Situationist International as a point of departure, offering both a critical review of Situationist ideas and a way to develop their radical democratic potential in the current political climate. Emphasizing the importance of thinking about the connection between spectacle and broader democratic processes, Rethinking the Spectacle also looks at various models of social and political organization and includes an in-depth assessment of the 2011 Occupy movement. Ultimately, Rethinking the Spectacle concludes that properly conceived spectacle can in fact mobilize the public for egalitarian purposes.
Author : Douglas Kellner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 23,59 MB
Release : 2003-08-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1134493959
During the mid-1990s, the O.J. Simpson murder trial dominated the media in the United States and were circulated throughout the world via global communications networks. The case became a spectacle of race, gender, class and violence, bringing in elements of domestic melodrama, crime drama and legal drama. According to this fascinating new book, the Simpson case was just one example of what the author calls 'media spectacle' - a form of media culture that puts contemporary dreams, nightmares, fantasies and values on display. Through the analysis of several such media spectacles - including Elvis, The X Files, Michael Jordan, and the Bill Clinton sex scandals - Doug Kellner draws out important insights into media, journalism, the public sphere and politics in an era of new technologies. In this excellent follow up to his best selling Media Culture, Kellner's fascinating new volume delivers an informative read for students of sociology, culture and media.
Author : Nadja Durbach
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 39,92 MB
Release : 2009-10-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0520944895
In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's "prevailing taste for deformity." This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; "Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy," a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's "missing link"; the "Last of the Mysterious Aztecs" and African "Cannibal Kings," who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness--and thus clarified what it meant to be British—at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities.
Author : Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 30,75 MB
Release : 1996-10
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9780814782224
A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal. Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits. Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.
Author : Guy Debord
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 105 pages
File Size : 22,51 MB
Release : 2011-01-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1844676722
First published in 1967, Guy Debord’s stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired acult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideasgenerated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attackon commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everydaylife continues to burn brightly in today’s age of satellite televisionand the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, publishedtwenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previousanalysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in aperiod when the “integrated spectacle” was dominant. Resolutely refusingto be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through thedoxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to showhow aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, theMafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacularsociety. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logicof domination, Debord’s Comments convey the revolutionary impulse atthe heart of situationism.
Author : K. Durga Bhavani
Publisher : Cambridge India
Page : 122 pages
File Size : 41,96 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Mass media
ISBN : 8175967684
Contributed articles presented at a national seminar on "Women in/and Media" on women in mass media conducted at Osmania University, Hyderabad.
